13 Things You Didn't Know About Friday The 13th Part 2

13. The Original Cast And Crew Thought It Was Stupid

Cunningham’s original idea for the sequel involved using the Friday The 13th name as part of an annual release strategy: once a year, a new Friday movie would be released with a new concept, plot and characters.

However, the film’s distributors reportedly insisted on continuity between the first and second movies. It was decided, given the popularity of the closing scare with Jason Voorhees rising from the water to attack final girl Alice Hardy, that Jason himself should be the new killer.

Cunningham and original writer Victor Miller hated the idea - and they still do. That coda had only ever been a gag, a way to inflict a final scare on the audience - that’s why it was framed as dream sequence, which allowed for Jason to appear as a child despite having died two decades earlier. Jason Voorhees was only ever supposed to be a plot device. For Mrs Voorhees’ motivation to work, he had to have died in 1957.

Effects and prosthetics whiz kid Tom Savini felt the same way, commenting dismissively:

"For Jason to be around today means what? He survived by living off of the crawfish on the side of the lake? For 35 years? Nobody saw this kid walking around and growing up?"

Meanwhile Betsy Palmer, the actor who’d played Mrs Voorhees and who’d created a backstory for her character that she identified with strongly, simply insisted that ‘her son’ was dead.